Shakespeare's Bastard E-Book

Simon Andrew Stirling

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 497

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Sir William Davenant (1606–1668) – Poet Laureate and Civil War hero – is one of the most influential and neglected figures in the history of British theatre. He introduced 'opera', actresses, scenes and the proscenium arch to the English stage. Narrowly escaping execution for his Royalist activities during the Civil War, he revived theatrical performances in London, right under Oliver Cromwell's nose. Nobody, perhaps, did more to secure Shakespeare's reputation or to preserve the memory of the Bard. Davenant was known to boast over a glass of wine that he wrote 'with the very spirit' of Shakespeare and was happy to be thought of as Shakespeare's son. By recounting the story of his eventful life backwards, through his many trials and triumphs, this biography culminates with a fresh examination of the vexed issue of Davenant's paternity. Was Sir William's mother the voluptuous and maddening 'Dark Lady' of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and was he Shakespeare's 'lovely boy'?

Leseprobe

William Faithorne’s engraving of Sir William Davenant (1673).

Davenant’s most anthologised poem, from The Works of Sr William D’avenant Kt (1673).

An ART & WILL Book

To Kim,

eudail de mhnathan an domhain

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following: the Rector and Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford; my colleagues and students at the University of Worcester; Keith Barnes; Mike Jones at Rare Old Prints; Julian Smith at The White Bear; the vicar and churchwardens at St Leonard’s, Beoley; Jacqueline Rattray and Johanna Franklin at Goldsmiths; Richard Peach; Steve and Julie Wadlow; the late Michael (Lord) Birkett; Lee Durkee; Dr Joanne Paul; Ceilidh Lerwick; Dr Alan Ogden; Anna Davies; Shana and Sid; Al Petrie; my parents, Norman and Brenda, for the books; Janet and John Ford at Tudor World, Stratford-upon-Avon, for helping to fund the research; the Historical Honeys; Rebecca Rideal; my editors, Mark Beynon and Juanita Zoë Hall, and the team at The History Press; and, as ever, Kim and Kiri.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Preface

     PART ONE   RESTORATION (1660–1668)

  1    O Rare Sir Will Davenant

  2    His Sacred Majestie’s Most Happy Return

  3    A Teeming Muse

  4    His Exit

    PART TWO   REVOLUTION (1639–1659)

  5    Davenant the Poet

  6    Davenet the Poet (Now Knighted)

  7    Gondibert

  8    How Daphne Pays His Debts

PART THREE   A YOUNG MAN IN LONDON (1622–1638)

  9    Ffor Avoyding of Inconvenience

10    The Shade of Gentle Buckingham

11    Servant to Her Majestie

12    A Mighty Debt

  PART FOUR    A CHILD IN OXFORD (1621–1606)

13    Shakespears Vncle

14    W. H.

15    Babes and Beggers

16    1605: A Lover’s Complaint

Selected Bibliography

Copyright

Preface

On 26 February 1936, members of the Davenant Society gathered to celebrate the 330th anniversary of the birth of Sir William Davenant. They met in the recently restored Painted Chamber, in what had been the tavern run by Davenant’s parents, where they were treated to an ‘informal address’ by Edgar Cardew Marchant, sub-rector of Lincoln College.

Marchant observed that Davenant’s was ‘indeed a career of strange vicissitudes, of many ups and downs, mainly downs: and shows him to have been a man of unlimited resource, undaunted courage, and unruffled good temper. When one has read the account of his life, one does not know whether to guffaw with laughter or to weep; so grotesque is it, yet so pathetic.’ But on the subject of Davenant’s paternity, he was in no doubt:

The story that William Davenant was the illegitimate son of Shakespeare has no basis of fact. Scott in his Woodstock jests upon this possibility, but Scott was too good an antiquarian seriously to have accepted such a story. The only original authority is Aubrey, who almost certainly wrote the story when he was drunk. I hope the society will dismiss it from their minds.

E.C. Marchant’s ‘informal address’ was hardly a model of accuracy. In almost the same breath as his blunt dismissal of the ‘son of Shakespeare’ story he argued that the apostrophe in Davenant’s name – ‘D’Avenant’ – was ‘a fancy of his third wife, Lady Davenant, who was a Frenchwoman; it was used by him only in the later part of his life’. In fact, Davenant was using the apostrophe a good quarter of a century before his third marriage. Marchant was also strangely ill-disposed towards much of Davenant’s work – ‘I cannot carry in my mind the plot of any one of Davenant’s plays’; ‘the epic [Gondibert] as a whole is completely unreadable’; ‘to the last years of Davenant’s life belong the deplorable adaptations of Shakespeare’ – and managed to get the date of Ben Jonson’s death wrong.

Marchant was senior honorary member of the Davenant Society and sub-rector of Davenant’s old Oxford college. And yet he could not bring himself to remember the plots of Davenant’s plays or to give credit where it was due. With friends like that, one might think, Davenant had no need of enemies.

No evidence of any kind was adduced to support Marchant’s contention that the ‘story that William Davenant was the illegitimate son of Shakespeare has no basis of fact’. No evidence was given because none had been looked for. The most compelling question about Davenant – was he, as he apparently claimed to have been, the illegitimate son of Shakespeare? – was repudiated on no grounds whatsoever: ‘I hope the society will dismiss it from their minds.’

It had not always been so. During his lifetime, and in the years that followed, Davenant’s relationship with Shakespeare was much talked about. Reputable figures – many with connections to Davenant’s Oxford – accepted that Sir William had probably been the product of an illicit liaison between the Bard of Avon and the buxom mistress of the Taverne. Then it became streng verboten to consider the possibility that Davenant was Shakespeare’s son. Not that any evidence had come to light to quash the rumours. Academic intolerance demanded that the story be rejected out of hand.

I became interested in Sir William Davenant while working on Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, The Motive, The Means (The History Press, 2013) and soon discovered that I liked him. He was undoubtedly brave, resourceful, industrious and loyal. Moreover, biographies of Davenant are few and far between. Bearing in mind his status as England’s second poet laureate, his role in the English Civil War and his theatrical innovations, it seemed that he had been unjustly overlooked by biographers. I guessed that the main reason for this neglect was the awkward matter of his paternity, since any biographer would have to broach the subject, and this would require either a blanket denial (without evidence) or a serious engagement with the story, which might be detrimental to one’s career prospects. Best to leave well alone.

But Davenant deserves to be taken seriously, as does the question ‘was he Shakespeare’s son?’ This book is an attempt to answer that question. To avoid a biography that feels too front-loaded – the most pertinent part being the very start of his life – I resolved to arrange it backwards. Thus, Part One (‘Restoration’) recounts Davenant’s final years, after the return of King Charles II. The second part (‘Revolution’) covers Davenant’s activities immediately before, during and after the Civil War. Part Three (‘A Young Man in London’) explores the beginnings of Davenant’s theatrical career, while Part Four (‘A Child in Oxford’) concentrates on the links between the young Davenant, and his parents, and William Shakespeare, working towards the final section (‘1605’) in which the extraordinary love affair between Shakespeare and Davenant’s mother is revealed.

Much of the book grew out of, and builds upon, my research for Who Killed William Shakespeare? There have been developments since that book was written: Steve Wadlow introduced me to his remarkable portrait, which I believe to be of Shakespeare; Goldsmiths, University of London, published my paper on ‘The Faces of Shakespeare’; and at the time of writing moves are underway, led by a team from the University of Staffordshire, in conjunction with a Channel 4 documentary, to determine whether or not the Beoley skull is indeed the ‘veritable skull of William Shakespeare’. Some of the information presented in Who Killed William Shakespeare? has been duly revised. For example, I previously claimed that Shakespeare had dallied with Jane Sheppard-Davenant at Banwell in Somerset; further research has convinced me that I was wrong, and that the Shakespeare–Jane–Southampton love triangle actually unfolded on the outskirts of Bristol.

Wherever possible I have quoted from the earliest available written source or publication (the main exceptions to this rule being Samuel Pepys’s Diary and John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, the originals of which are too idiosyncratic to be readily comprehensible) but I have amended the typography, standardising the uses of ‘u’ and ‘v’ and avoiding the long ‘s’ which can make wise look like wife, and so on.

With the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death upon us, the time has come for a reassessment of the life and achievements of the man who liked to be thought of as Shakespeare’s bastard: Sir William Davenant, poet laureate and Civil War hero.

Simon Andrew Stirling

Inside the Duke’s Theatre, Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1673).

PART ONE

Restoration

1660–1668

1

O Rare Sir Will Davenant

Samuel Pepys spent the morning of Thursday, 9 April 1668 in his office on Seething Lane, just west of the Tower of London. He popped home for dinner at midday, and then it was back to the Navy Office to write some letters. He slipped away in the afternoon to visit his bookseller, John Martyn, at the sign of the bell in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. From there, he made his way westwards to Lincoln’s Inn Fields – or, as he put it, ‘up and down to the Duke of York’s playhouse, there to see, which I did, Sir W. Davenant’s corpse carried out towards Westminster, there to be buried’.

The house in which Sir William Davenant had lodged was attached to the rear of the theatre and could be reached via an alleyway. Pepys watched the mourners clustering on the street as the coffin was brought out. ‘Here were many coaches and six horses,’ he observed. A private coach was an expensive way to travel, costing about 5s to hire for the day or (as Pepys himself was soon to discover) upwards of £50 to buy outright. There were also, he noted with distaste, ‘many hacknies, that made it look, methought, like the buriall of a poor poet’.

The hackney coach was the ancestor of the London taxicab – still known as a ‘hackney carriage’ – and cost about 18d to hire for the first hour. Pepys clearly felt that the presence of so many hackneys lowered the tone.

The diarist had been at the king’s playhouse, two nights before, when the news reached him of Davenant’s sudden death. He took time out of his hectic schedule to see Sir William leave the Duke of York’s playhouse for the last time. Pepys had not always been complimentary about Davenant’s productions, but he admired the man. A portrait, painted by John Hayls two years before Davenant’s death, shows the 33-year-old Pepys glancing – gelatinous eyes looking a bit strained – over his left shoulder, a handwritten sheet of music in his hand. The tune was his own, set to the words of a song by Sir William Davenant. The industrious Mr Pepys was proud of his composition.

The cortège finally departed from the theatre, heading towards the Strand. ‘He seemed to have many children,’ wrote Pepys in his diary, ‘by five or six in the first mourning-coach, all boys.’ Sir William in fact had eight surviving sons by his third wife, the eldest then being about twelve. The sight of so many healthy boys no doubt cut Pepys to the heart: he longed for a son, but he and his French wife were, and would remain, childless.

He did not follow the funeral procession but sought solace by walking down to the Strand where, amidst the bustle of the New Exchange, he met the attractive widow of a naval lieutenant. Pepys rode with Mrs Burroughs to Hyde Park, kissing her, but they ‘did not go into any house’. Rather, as he ‘set her down at White Hall’ he presented her with a Valentine’s gift ‘for the last year before this, which I never did yet give her anything for’. His fumbling with Mrs Burroughs in the four-wheeled carrosse seems half-hearted, the belated gift of twelve silver half-crown coins ‘wrapt in paper’ lacking both romance and imagination.

Pepys returned to the office and kept himself busy, practising musical scales before supper, but his usual ebullience was lacking. The death of Sir William Davenant, the sight of those hackney coaches jostling outside the theatre, and all those young sons dressed in black, had left him morose and unsettled. Even petting a pretty widow in a carriage could rouse little more in him than a deflating sense of guilt.

John Aubrey knew Davenant’s family in Oxford. ‘I was at his funeral’, wrote Aubrey twelve years after the event. ‘He had a coffin of walnut tree. Sir John Denham said it was the finest coffin that ever he saw’ – which might not have been the smooth compliment it appears to be. Aubrey was disappointed not to see a laurel wreath placed on the coffin.

Samuel Pepys holding his musical composition to Davenant’s words.

‘His body was carried in a hearse from the playhouse to Westminster Abbey, where at the great west door, he was received by the singing men and choristers, who sang the service of the church to his grave.’

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away …

The walnut coffin was carried the length of the nave to the south transept, where the grave was already prepared. It had previously housed the remains of Thomas May, Davenant’s sometime rival for the post of poet laureate. May’s outspoken support for Oliver Cromwell’s dictatorship ensured that his bones were removed from the abbey when King Charles was restored to the throne.

I held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.

My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled: and at the last I spake with my tongue …

Deliver me from all mine offences: and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.

The small gravestone of white marble was inscribed O RARE S. WILLIAM DAVENANT. John Aubrey recorded the inscription as ‘O rare Sir Will. Davenant’ and remarked that it was written ‘in imitation of that on Ben Jonson’. Jonson had been buried, in an upright position, on the north side of the nave, under a lozenge-shaped slab which read O RARE BEN JOHNSON. The sentiment, in both instances, was Catholic.

Jonson’s only true religion had been Ben Jonson. Davenant was a Catholic convert, although his faith was essentially pragmatic. John Aubrey claimed that Sir William privately believed religion would eventually settle into ‘a kind of ingenious Quakerism’, combining inspiration with social equality.

‘Orare Sir Will. Davenant’ – ‘Pray for Sir William Davenant.’

It was a measure of the turbulence of recent times that a staunch Catholic like Richard Flecknoe had written in praise of Cromwell, the Puritan figurehead, in 1650 (The idea of His Highness Oliver …, dedicated to Cromwell’s son). Flecknoe redeemed himself, ten years later, by penning his Heroick Portraits of Charles II and other members of the Stuart dynasty. He also wrote plays and enjoyed putting together fantasy casts of actors, but he was deeply critical of the immorality of the stage.

‘Sir William D’avenant being dead, not a Poet would afford him so much as an Elegie’, proclaimed Flecknoe in a ‘Poetical Fiction’ entitled Sir William Davenant’s Voyage to the other World: with his Adventures in the Poets’ Elizium. Davenant had alienated his fellow poets, Flecknoe suggested, by seeking to ‘make a Monopoly of the Art’ and striving ‘to become Rich’.1 According to Flecknoe, only one poet, ‘more Humane than the rest, accompany’d him to his Grave with this Elogium’:

Now Davenant’s dead, the Stage will mourn,

And all to Barbarism turn:

Since He it was this later Age,

Who chiefly civiliz’d the Stage.

After five quatrains of routine praise, Richard Flecknoe followed Sir William on his posthumous progress.

Believing Davenant to be rich, Charon the ferryman demanded a handsome reward for piloting him across the Styx, only to discover that the poet laureate was so poor he couldn’t afford the ordinary fare. The poets already inhabiting the Elysian Fields were surprised to see him, his death having received no publicity at all, and were unhappy to be joined by one who had disparaged such paragons as ‘Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Spencer, and especially Ben. Johnson … Nay, even Shakspear, whom he thought to have found his greatest Friend, was as much offended with him as any of the rest, for so spoiling and mangling of his Plays.’ Jack Donne, the son of John Donne, was especially aggrieved to see Davenant and railed against him with such venom that Sir William grew exasperated. The two poets ‘Fell together by the ears: when but imagine / What tearing Noses had been there / Had they but Noses for to tear’.

Famously, Davenant’s nose had been ruined by syphilis.

The fight between Sir William and ‘his old Antagonist Jack Donn’ was broken up by the celestial police and Davenant was hauled before a tribunal. Momus, the savage critic, appeared for the prosecution.

Davenant told the heavenly judges that ‘he was a Poet Laureate, who for Poetry in general has not his fellow alive, and had left none to equal him now he was dead’. In his ‘Plays or Dramatick Poetry’ he had plumbed the depths of tragedy and scaled the heights of tragicomedy:

And for his Wits, the Comick Fire

In none yet ever flam’d up higher:

But coming to his Siege of Rhodes,

It outwent all the rest by odds;

And somewhat in’t that does out-do

Both th’ Antients and the Moderns too.

Momus countered, arguing that Davenant’s plays were ‘never so good’, but it was unbecoming of their author to commend them as he did – and besides, he had marred more plays than he had made; his ‘Muse was none of the Nine, but only a Mongrel, or By-blow of Parnassus’; and ‘finally, he so perplexed himself and [his] Readers with Parenthesis on Parenthesis, as, just as in a wilderness or Labyrinth, all sense was lost in them.’

And as for his Life and Manners, they would not examine those, since ‘twas supposed they were Licentious enough: onely he wou’d say,

He was a good Companion for

The Rich, but ill one for the poor;

On whom he look’d so, you’d believe

He walk’d with a Face Negative:

Whilst he must be a Lord at least,

For whom he’d smile or break a jeast.

The judges took pity on Davenant. Since he had left the Muses for Pluto – betraying his poetic gifts for monetary gain – he was condemned to live in Pluto’s Court, where he was appointed ‘Superintendent of all their Sports and Recreations’. As he had flourished in this world, entertaining a profligate king and his dissolute courtiers, so he would in the next.

Such was the judgement of Richard Flecknoe. Sir William had overestimated his own talent and achievements: he was good, but not that good. He had pandered to the mighty and slighted better poets than himself, Ben Jonson in particular. Worse, perhaps, he had spoiled and mangled the plays of Shakespeare, whom he particularly admired. It all smacked of a talent ruthlessly exploited but ultimately wasted.

And there had been no mention of his death in the weekly gazettes. No ‘Cryers of Verses and Pamphlets’ had broadcast his obituary.

Davenant was succeeded as poet laureate by John Dryden – another Catholic convert – who had no time for Flecknoe’s anti-theatrical posturing. Dryden had collaborated with Davenant on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which they subtitled The Enchanted Island. This was one of those plays which, in Flecknoe’s view, Davenant had mangled and spoilt.

The Enchanted Island was first performed at Sir William Davenant’s theatre precisely five months before he died. The script was published in 1670 with a preface by Dryden, dated 1 December 1669. Davenant ‘was a man of quick and piercing imagination’, wrote Dryden, who went on to praise Sir William in terms which would delight a modern-day producer: ‘my writing received daily his amendments, and that is the reason why it is not so faulty, as the rest which I have done without the help or correction of so judicious a friend’:

And as his fancy was quick, so likewise were the products of it remote and new. He borrowed not of any other; and his imaginations were such as could not easily enter into any other man. His corrections were sober and judicious: and he corrected his own writings much more severely than those of another man, bestowing twice the time and labour in polishing which he us’d in invention.

Davenant, then, was the consummate professional. Dryden refused to treat him with the same ‘ingratitude’ that others had shown to him: ‘I am satisfi’d I could never have receiv’d so much honour in being thought the Author of any Poem how excellent soever, as I shall from the joining my imperfections with the merit and name of Shakespear and Sir William Davenant.’

When the critic and biographer Gerard Langbaine included a section on Davenant in his Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), Sir William’s lasting reputation seemed assured. He was a ‘Person sufficiently known to all Lovers of Poetry, and One whose Works will preserve his Memory to Posterity’, having been ‘Poet Laureate to Two Kings, whose Memory will always be Sacred to all good, loyal, and witty Men’. Most of his plays had ‘appeared on the Stage with good applause, and been received with like success in Print’, and then there were his poems, ‘amongst which Gondibert an Epick Poem has made the greatest noise.’

Gondibert had been dedicated to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who not only accepted the dedication but replied with an ‘extraordinary Compliment’ to Davenant: ‘The Virtues you distribute in your Poem, amongst so many Noble Persons, represent (in the Reading) the image but of One Man’s Virtue to my fancy, which is your own.’ The addition of commendations by ‘two of our best Poets’ – Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley – should ‘have proved a sufficient Defence and Protection against the snarling Criticks’, thought Langbaine. But Davenant was never without his detractors. Four ‘eminent Wits’ (most notably, Sir John Denham, who commented on how fine Sir William’s walnut coffin was, and Jack Donne, with whom Davenant brawled in Flecknoe’s poetic Elysium) had published ‘several Copies of Verses to Sir William’s discredit’ to be printed with the second edition of Gondibert in 1653.

Still, Davenant had risen above the many ‘Railleries [that] were broached against him by his Enemies’. It was true that his coffin had ‘wanted the Ornament of his Laureate’s Crown’:

But this omission is sufficiently recompenc’d by an Eternal Fame, which will always accompany his Memory; he having been the first Introducer of all that is splendid in our English Opera’s, and ‘tis by his means and industry, that our Stage at present rivals the Italian Theatre.

Regardless of his critics, Davenant had earned his rightful place in the Pantheon.

Samuel Carter Hall agreed. In the first volume of his Book of Gems: The Poets and Artists of Great Britain (1836) Hall observed that Davenant’s ‘poetical reputation’ rested almost entirely on Gondibert, ‘which he, unfortunately, left unfinished’, and that ‘critics have remarkably differed as to its merits.’ Davenant had set out to ‘produce an epic on a plan altogether original, “an endeavour to lead Truth through unfrequented and new ways, by representing Nature, though not in an affected, yet in a new dress”.’ However beautiful in parts, though, the poem as a whole had failed. ‘A single error therefore, a false step at the outset, deprived Davenant of “what his large soul appears to have been full of, a true and permanent glory.”’

Hall concluded: ‘Davenant is now little read; his fame scarcely outlived his days. But posterity, in neglecting him, has not done justice; and it was a silly verdict that condemned him for having rehearsed “A theme ill-chosen in ill-chosen verse”.’2

The fault lay not with Davenant’s talent, but with changing attitudes – as Robert Anderson put it in his Works of the British Poets (1795): ‘The epic poem of Gondibert is unquestionably the noblest production of his genius; and would do honour to any writer of any age or country. The fate which it has experienced conveys reproach upon the inconstancy of national taste …’

The national taste left Davenant behind. His entry in the 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume VII, published in 1910, described Gondibert as a ‘cumbrous, dull production’ whilst admitting that the epic ‘is relieved with a multitude of fine and felicitous passages, and lends itself most happily to quotation’. This grudging concession was followed, however, by a damning verdict:

The personal character, adventures and fame of Davenant, and more especially his position as a leading reformer, or rather debaser, of the stage, have always given him a prominence in the history of literature which his writings hardly justify. His plays are utterly unreadable, and his poems are usually stilted and unnatural. With Cowley he marks the process of transition from the poetry of the imagination to the poetry of the intelligence; but he had far less genius than Cowley, and his influence on English drama must be condemned as wholly deplorable.

Alfred Harbage, in his 1935 biography Sir William Davenant: Poet Venturer, referred to his subject as ‘one of the disreputables of literary history’ and ‘a quixote – courageous, loyal, sincere, rather naïve, but withal shrewd and resourceful.’ Sir William was ‘a poet in his heart. He brought to the shrine of the Muses a devotion of which the other Caroline writers were incapable. And this devotion was expressed in actual works, for Davenant possessed energy and initiative unparalleled in the enervated circle of which he formed a part.’

‘We prefer to read Milton’, wrote Harbage, questionably. ‘Yet we should prefer to have made a journey with Davenant.’

Sir William was, as Harbage remarked, ‘the chief conduit through which Shakespearean stage tradition has reached us today’. Davenant straddled the chasm of the Cromwellian Protectorate, linking the pre-Commonwealth theatrical world with the mannered Restoration stage. He was one of the most innovative and influential impresarios in theatre history, a Civil War general, poet laureate and political prisoner, devoted royal servant and enemy of the state. To dismiss his contribution to British drama, or indeed to history, as ‘wholly deplorable’ is unreasonable and unwarranted.

Why has Davenant’s reputation suffered so badly?

At first glance, he cuts a comic figure. Opposite the title page of The Works of Sir William D’avenant, published five years after his death, was printed an engraving by William Faithorne, based on a lost portrait by John Greenhill. The engraving shows Sir William in neoclassical mode, a laurel crown capping the tumbling curls of his periwig. The mask-like visage is the face of a fool. The eyes, which gaze off to the left, have a guileless vacancy about them. But what really stands out is the misshapen button nose with its gaping left nostril. The dose of syphilis which Davenant caught from a dark-haired beauty in Westminster had ravaged the appendage, collapsing the bridge and turning his nose into a snout.

Faithorne’s engraving is the only accepted image of the poet laureate, and it is all too easy to see it as the portrait of an amusing pretender, a pygmy who would be a giant. And yet, there is another portrait, less well known, which presents a very different image of the man – more sensitive, more serious – before his nose was sacrificed to ‘a terrible clap’.

Nevertheless, to judge Davenant’s achievements on the basis of his unfortunate engraving is at best unworthy. It is also convenient, for by sneering at Sir William, commentators have excused themselves from having to engage sensibly with the most intriguing aspect of his story.

The problem begins with John Aubrey, who attended Sir William’s funeral in 1668. Aubrey’s potted biography of Davenant, which formed part of his Brief Lives, included a startling revelation: ‘Mr William Shakespeare was wont to go into Warwickshire once a year, and did commonly in his journey lie at this house [the Davenants’ tavern] in Oxford, where he was exceedingly respected’:

Now Sir William would sometimes, when he was pleasant over a glass of wine with his most intimate friends, e.g. Sam Butler (author of Hudibras),3 etc – say, that it seemed to him that he wrote with the very spirit that Shakespeare [wrote], and seemed contented enough to be thought his son: he would tell them the story as above, in which way his mother had a very light report.

John Aubrey knew the Davenant family well. He added, ‘(I have heard parson Robert [Sir William’s elder brother] say that Mr W. Shakespeare has given him a hundred kisses.)’

Aubrey passed the original drafts of his Brief Lives to his Oxford contemporary, Anthony Wood, who was himself the source of another rumour. This was written down by the antiquarian William Oldys in the eighteenth century:

If tradition may be trusted, Shakspeare often baited at the Crown Inn or Tavern in Oxford, in his journey to and from London. The landlady was a woman of great beauty and sprightly wit, and her husband, Mr. John Davenant, (afterwards mayor of that city,) a grave melancholy man; who, as well as his wife, used much to delight in Shakspeare’s pleasant company. Their son, young Will. Davenant, (afterwards Sir William) was then a little school-boy in the town, of about seven or eight years old, and so fond also of Shakspeare, that whenever he heard of his arrival, he would fly from school to see him. One day an old townsman observing the boy running homeward almost out of breath, asked him whither he was posting in that heat and hurry. He answered, to see his god-father Shakspeare. There’s a good boy, said the other, but have a care that you don’t take God’s name in vain.

Oldys had heard this anecdote from none other than the diminutive poet Alexander Pope, who died in 1744 and who claimed to have heard the tale from the great actor Thomas Betterton, who had worked closely with Davenant. Pope told the story at a dinner hosted by the Earl of Oxford, when the conversation had turned to the subject of the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey, which Pope had helped to erect in 1741. By all accounts, Pope believed the story to be true.

The Shakespeare scholar George Steevens (died 1780) refused to credit the rumour on the slender grounds that Sir William’s ‘heavy, vulgar, unmeaning face’ simply could not have been that of a son of Shakespeare (the curse of Davenant’s nose striking again). By way of contrast, Alfred Harbage noted in 1935 that men in the eighteenth century ‘were holding his [Davenant’s] portrait beside Shakespeare’s, and finding in the two a marked resemblance!’ And they were right to, for reasons which will become clear.

Thomas Hearne, a sober and scholarly antiquarian of Oxford, added to the scandal in a note dated 30 July 1709:

’Twas reported by tradition in Oxford, that Shakespear, as he used to pass from London to Stratford upon Avon, where he lived and now lies buried, always spent some time in the Crown tavern in Oxford, which was kept by one Davenant, who had a handsome wife, and loved witty company, though himself a reserved and melancholly man. He had born to him a son, who was afterwards christened by the name of William, who proved a very eminent poet, and was knighted, (by the name of sir William Davenant,) and the said Mr. Shakespear was his godfather, and gave him his name. (In all probability he got him.) ’Tis further said, that one day going from school, a grave doctor in divinity met him, and asked him, ‘Child, whether art thou going in such hast?’ To which the child replyed, ‘O, sir, my god-father is come to town, and I am going to ask his blessing.’ To which the Dr. said, ‘Hold, child! You must not take the name of God in vaine.’

Same joke, differently told. Hearne rehearsed the longstanding Oxford tradition that Will Shakespeare was Sir William’s godfather, but then he went further – ‘(In all probability he got him.)’ This was a mere forty years after Davenant’s death.

The rumours persisted, becoming an irritant to those scholars who, in the late eighteenth century, were determinedly transforming Shakespeare into the epitome of patriotic English virtues. It was an era in which the living, breathing Shakespeare was being swept aside to make way for ‘the universal genius’. Awkward details had to be omitted from his biography so that the ‘god of our Idolatry’ could mount his pedestal. Few details were more embarrassing than the rumours that ‘Immortal Shakespeare’ had fathered an illegitimate son.

As Shakespeare was elevated into a grotesquely artificial – and strangely immaterial – paragon, so his godson was slandered. Thus, the anonymous contributor to Encyclopædia Britannica brought his bigotry to bear:

It was stated that Shakespeare always stopped at this [the Davenants’] house in passing through the city of Oxford, and out of his known or rumoured admiration of the hostess, a very fine woman, there sprang a scandalous story which attributed Davenant’s paternity to Shakespeare, a legend which there is reason to believe Davenant himself encouraged, but which later criticism has cast aside as spurious.

This assessment might carry some weight if ‘later criticism’ had come up with any evidence to justify its prejudice.

The simple fact is that Will Shakespeare and Sir William Davenant were the victims of scholastic projections and chauvinism. For Shakespeare the demi-god to rise, Davenant with his funny nose must fall. Judgement was passed without the distraction of a trial. Shakespeare was everything; Davenant nothing.

Edmund Gosse encapsulated the unforgiving mood in 1880:

There is not a more hopelessly faded laurel on the slopes of the English Parnassus than that which once flourished so bravely around the grotesque head of Davenant. The enormous folio edition of his works, brought out in 1673 in direct emulation of Ben Jonson, is probably the most deplorable collection of verses anywhere to be found, dead and dusty beyond the wont of forgotten classics. The critic is inclined to say that everything is spurious about Davenant, from the legend that connects his blood with Shakespeare’s to the dramatic genius that his latest contemporaries praised so highly. He is not merely a ponderous, he is a nonsensical writer, and having begun life by writing meaningless romantic plays in imitation of Massinger, and insipid masques in the school of Ben Jonson, he closed his long and busy career by parodying the style of Dryden.

Which is to mistake character assassination for literary criticism.

Sir Walter Scott made hay with the gossip with his Civil War romance, published in 1826 under the title Woodstock, or The Cavalier: A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-one. In the twenty-fifth chapter, the future King Charles II is posing as a page named Louis Kerneguy:

‘Why, we are said to have one of his [Shakespeare’s] descendants among us – Sir William D’Avenant,’ said Louis Kerneguy; ‘And many think him as clever a fellow.’

‘What!’ exclaimed Sir Henry – ‘Will D’Avenant, whom I knew in the North, an officer under Newcastle, when the Marquis lay before Hull? – why, he was an honest cavalier, and wrote good doggerel enough; but how came he a-kin to Will Shakspeare, I trow?’

‘Why,’ replied the young Scot, ‘by the surer side of the house, and after the old fashion, if D’Avenant speaks truth. It seems that his mother was a good-looking, laughing, buxom mistress of an inn between Stratford and London, at which Shakspeare often quartered as he went down to his native town; and that out of friendship and gossipred, as we say in Scotland, Will Shakspeare became godfather to Will D’Avenant; and not contented with this spiritual affinity, the younger Will is for establishing some claim to a natural one, alleging that his mother was a great admirer of wit, and there were no bounds to her complaisance for men of genius.’

‘Out upon the hound!’ said Colonel Everard; ‘would he purchase the reputation of descending from poet, or from prince, at the expense of his mother’s good fame? – his nose ought to be slit.’

‘That would be difficult,’ answered the disguised Prince, recollecting the peculiarity of the bard’s countenance.4

Sir Walter had done his homework. The artist and antiquarian Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe had written to Scott on the anniversary of Davenant’s death, 7 April 1819: ‘I have been much amused with Will. Davenant, who you were so good as to give me. Some of his poetry is very smooth and charming, with now and then old-fashioned wild flight, very seldom to be met with now. I perceive that Pope stole a great deal from him, as he did from Shakespeare, who, if I remember right, was reported to have been his papa.’

The reports had circulated widely, emanating from the London theatre-land and the cloisters and watering-holes of Oxford. John Aubrey and Anthony Wood, Thomas Hearne and William Oldys, Thomas Betterton and Alexander Pope had all discussed the story; the eminent Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone believed it, as did Thomas Warton, the clergyman, schoolmaster and ‘second Professor of Poetry’ at Oxford, who communicated his memories of the rumour to Malone.

Robert Southey – Poet Laureate for 30 years before his death in 1843 – repeated the story with a grimace:

The father was a man of melancholy temperament, the mother handsome and lively; and as Shakspeare used to put up at the house on his journeys between Stratford and London, Davenant is said to have affected the reputation of being Shakspeare’s son. If he really did this, there was a levity, or rather a want of feeling, in the boast, for which social pleasantry, and the spirits which are induced by wine, afford but little excuse.

Only a maverick would dare to depart from the scholarly consensus. One such was Augustus Montague Summers, a clergyman from Bristol who served as a curate at Bitton and Bath before converting to Catholicism. His fascination with the occult was matched by his abiding interest in Restoration theatre. In The Playhouse of Pepys, published in 1935, Montague Summers brought an all-too-rare openmindedness to the Shakespeare-Davenant conundrum:

The tradition that William Davenant was Shakespeare’s son is, of course, impossible to establish. From the very nature of the case those most concerned – if indeed any save the father and mother knew the facts – would keep silence, although Davenant himself in merry mood was wont to make reference to his paternal ancestry, and the truth cannot be certainly ascertained at this time of day, although myself I see no reason at all why the story may not be accepted.

Maybe it was Summers’s Catholicism which set him apart from the more puritanical commentators who refused to countenance the possibility that ‘immortal’ Shakespeare had sired Sir William Davenant. Elsewhere, and in France especially, the matter was less controversial. It even formed the subject of a play, Davenant, by Jean Aicard, which was performed by the Comédie Française when they visited London in the summer of 1879.

Victor Hugo dropped a bombshell in 1864. The novelist was then thirteen years into his exile from the France of Napoleon III. His lengthy William Shakespeare essay incorporated a short and colourful biography, which included the following snippet (translated by Melville B. Anderson):

Shakespeare went from time to time to pass some days at New Place. Half-way upon the short journey he encountered Oxford, and at Oxford the Crown Inn, and at the inn the hostess, a beautiful, intelligent creature, wife of the worthy innkeeper, Davenant. In 1606 Mrs. Davenant was brought to bed of a son, whom they named William; and in 1644 Sir William Davenant, created knight by Charles I, wrote to [Lord] Rochester: ‘Know this, which does honour to my mother, I am the son of Shakespeare’; thus allying himself to Shakespeare in the same way that in our days M. Lucas [de] Montigny has claimed relationship with Mirabeau.

The dead weight of academic disapproval had forced the rumour into the shadows, and Davenant with it. He became the laughing stock of English literature and is now largely forgotten. But if Victor Hugo was right, and Sir William’s boast was true, then England’s second poet laureate was the result of a remarkable pairing.

Know this, which does honour to my mother –

I am Shakespeare’s son.

Notes

1.  Davenant died intestate, leaving no will or inventory of his belongings, and so his wealth is an unknown quantity.

2.  The quotation is from William Hayley’s Essay on Epic Poetry (1782).

3.  Samuel Butler (1613-80) published Hudibras, his satirical poem on religious sectarianism, in three parts between 1662 and 1678. His birthplace was Strensham in Worcestershire, where the lord of the manor was Sir William Russell (see Chapter 2).

4.  Scott helpfully provided a footnote, explaining that ‘D’Avenant actually wanted the nose, the foundation of many a jest of the day.’

2

His Sacred Majestie’sMost Happy Return

There must have been a sense of history repeating itself.

A fleet of warships crossed the English Channel, just as a similar fleet of twenty vessels had crossed the Channel thirty-five years earlier. Back in 1625 they had sailed to Boulogne to fetch Henrietta Maria, the youngest daughter of Henri IV and Marie de Médicis and now the bride of King Charles I. In 1660, they arrived at Scheveningen, the little fishing port which served as a harbour for The Hague, to collect the sons of Henrietta Maria – foremost amongst them, King Charles II.

The flagship boasted three decks and eighty guns. Launched in 1655, it was known as the Naseby. Samuel Pepys was on board, officially to serve his kinsman, Sir Edward Montagu, who had been appointed admiral, and unofficially to record the events in his diary.

King Charles boarded the Naseby. He was over 6ft tall, with a dark complexion and a ‘wide ugly mouth’. With him were his brothers, James Duke of York and Henry Duke of Gloucester, as well as his sister Mary and her son William, Prince of Orange, and his aunt Elizabeth, sometime Queen of Bohemia. Pepys kissed their hands and observed that there was an ‘infinite shooting off of the guns’.

The king and his brother James spent that afternoon of 23 May 1660 on the quarterdeck, changing the past. The Naseby, named after a decisive victory for Parliament in the Civil War, became the Royal Charles. The Richard, named after Oliver Cromwell’s son, became the James. The Speaker (of the House of Commons) was renamed Mary after Charles’s sister, the Princess Royal. Ships whose names recalled some hateful memory of defeat, such as the Dunbar and the Winsby, were rebranded Henry, after Charles’s youngest brother, and Happy Return. The Bradford became HMS Success. That done, King Charles and his brothers set sail for England.

The wind was fair, the weather fine. The king was restless, pacing ‘here and there, up and down’, wrote Pepys, ‘very active and stirring.’ He reminisced about his escape from Worcester in the autumn of 1651, when he had waded through mud for three days and four nights ‘with nothing but a green coat and a pair of country breeches on’, his borrowed shoes making his feet so sore, ‘he could hardly stir’. For six weeks he had been a fugitive, skulking in barns and copses. When he finally reached France he looked ‘so poorly’ that people checked the rooms he had been in ‘to see whether he had not stole something or other’. The king’s tales brought Sam Pepys close to tears.

By the next day, the sombre and reflective mood had lifted like a sea mist. Pepys found himself walking on the deck with ‘persons of honour’, including Tom Killigrew – ‘a merry droll, but a gentleman of great esteem with the King’ – whose sister had borne the exiled king a daughter. True to form, Killigrew told a dirty story.

Thomas Killigrew was an undereducated courtier who liked to vaunt his illiteracy. He was also a playwright, his principal contribution to the drama having been a bawdy piece entitled The Parson’s Wedding (Pepys described it as ‘an obscene, loose play’). But Killigrew was well connected. His cousin, Henry Jermyn, had just been created 1st Earl of St Albans. A devoted and beloved favourite of the king’s mother, Jermyn was either an ingenious spymaster who had helped to bring about the restoration of the English monarchy or a vainglorious meddler who invariably got in the way, depending on your point of view. Undoubtedly, though, Jermyn was one of the most influential figures around, and among those who had worked closely with him was the poet Sir William Davenant.

Killigrew was no match for Davenant as an artist, although that mattered little. Tom Killigrew and his father had served the king’s father and grandfather. Through his mother, Killigrew was related to Sir Francis Bacon and to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley and chief adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. He had followed Prince Charles into exile in 1647, and in 1651 – the year of Charles’s crushing defeat at Worcester – he became the king’s representative in Venice. The ‘merry droll’ had reason to expect a handsome return on his loyalty and would soon become Davenant’s rival for mastery of the London stage.

The White Cliffs were sighted on the morning of 25 May. The king and his brothers breakfasted on the staple food of the seaman: pease porridge, boiled beef and salted pork. Charles measured his height against a ship’s beam and gave instructions that the mark he had made should be gilded. He also gifted £500 to the officers and crew of the Royal Charles.

They landed at Dover, like Charles’s mother a generation earlier. The king went ashore with his brothers. Pepys followed in another longboat with one of the king’s spaniels ‘which shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are’.

King Charles was warmly greeted by General Monck, who had done so much to secure the king’s return. The townsfolk of Dover had turned out en masse – as Pepys remarked, ‘infinite the crowd of people and the gallantry of the horsemen, citizens, and noblemen of all sorts.’ A local gentleman wrote rather feverishly that ‘there never was in any nation so much joy both inwardly felt and outwardly expresst, as was in this Kingdom from the day of His Majestie landing at Dover.’

Charles did not stop at Dover but took a coach to Canterbury, 14 miles inland, where his parents had spent their first night together in 1625. The roads were lined with the maidens and militiamen of Kent, cheering wildly. Ahead of the king, all the way to London’s Tower Hill, went the gunfire and cannonades. Fires blazed on the hilltops, so that ‘All England but one Bonfire seems to be’, in the words of the poet Abraham Cowley.

After Sunday service in Canterbury Cathedral, King Charles moved on to Rochester, where he abandoned his coach and rode on horseback to Blackheath. The army had been drawn up there by General Monck. Morris dancers cavorted. In all, about 100,000 people had gathered to welcome his majesty.

The king took four days to travel from Dover to Deptford. The leisurely pace meant that Charles entered the capital on 29 May – his 30th birthday.

‘This day came in his majesty Charles the Second to London after a sad and long exile, and calamitous suffering both of the king and the church, being seventeen years’, wrote the diarist, John Evelyn. Bareheaded, with his brothers on either side of him, Charles rode through Southwark and then, following the Lord Mayor, crossed London Bridge to enter the city at two in the afternoon. Evelyn described ‘a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords and shouting with unexpressible joy: the ways strewed with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine.’ Three hundred gentlemen in doublets of silver, and 300 more in velvet cloaks, all with their liveried servants, walked in the procession, as did the soldiers in buff coats, the Sheriff’s men in red cloaks, the aldermen in their scarlet gowns and the members of the City of London Livery Companies wearing golden chains. Ladies waved and cheered from windows and balconies; trumpets blared and cannons roared. Music was heard everywhere as ‘myriads of people’ flocked through the thoroughfares. The stragglers passed through the city at nine in the evening.

John Evelyn ‘stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God … for such a restoration was never seen in the mention of any history, ancient or modern … nor so joyful a day, and so bright, ever seen in this nation’.

By the time the king reached the palace of Whitehall at seven o’clock he was tired, dazed and somewhat deafened. In response to the flattering speeches of the Speakers of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, Charles smirked: it must have been his fault he had been out of the country for so long, since there seemed to be no Englishman ‘who did not protest that he had ever wished for his return’.

John Dryden, the 28-year-old poet and soon-to-be playwright, celebrated the ‘Happy Restoration and Return of His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second’ in a poem he published that June:

For his long absence Church and State did groan;

Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne:

Experienced age in deep despair was lost,

To see the rebel thrive, the loyal cross’d

Like many, Dryden was tainted by association with the Cromwellian regime. He hopefully entitled his poem Astraea Redux. Astraea, the Greek goddess of justice, innocence and purity, had been ‘brought back’:

At home the hateful names of parties cease,

And factious souls are wearied into peace.

The discontented now are only they

Whose crimes before did your just cause betray

Dryden was anxious to ingratiate himself with the ‘happy prince’ who had promised to punish only his father’s murderers, and so Astraea Redux sought to exonerate those collaborators who were ‘reform’d by what we did amiss’:

Oh happy age! oh times like those alone […]

When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshow

The world a monarch, and that monarch you.

John Dryden was not yet Poet Laureate. That honour had been bestowed on William Davenant by King Charles the first, twenty-two years earlier.

Davenant published his own ‘POEM upon His Sacred Majestie’s most happy Return to His Dominions’ that same month. Like Dryden, Sir William averred that justice and religion had disintegrated in the chaos of insurrection and martial law. But truth and wisdom, tempered by experience, had thankfully been restored:

And now your Nations shall with early Eyes,

Watch the first Clouds e’re storms of Rebels rise.

Though Orators (the People’s Witches) may

Raise higher Tempests then their skill can lay […]

Yet can they not to full rebellion grow;

Not knowing how much now the People know;

Who from your influence have attain’d the wit

Not to proceed from grudgings to a Fit.

Such thoughts were no doubt suited to the hour. They were, however, overly optimistic. Whilst the first signs of unrest – those rumbling ‘grudgings’ which could be worked up into a revolutionary ‘Fit’ – might now be recognisable, and the republican experiment had failed, the days of the Stuart monarchy were numbered.

Sir William Davenant had already spent more time on earth than his godfather, William Shakespeare. He was 54, and his best days lay ahead of him. Five years into his third marriage, he had begun to produce that crop of sons which Pepys would notice eight years later at Sir William’s funeral. The eldest, christened Charles in honour of the exiled king, had been born in about 1656.

The hated Parliament, which had twice imprisoned Davenant, voted itself out of existence on 16 March 1660, having prepared the legislation for a ‘free parliament’ which would formally invite Charles II to return and claim his throne. The next day Davenant obtained a pass permitting him to travel to France. In the light of subsequent events it seems unlikely that he was hurrying to join the king, who was then in Brussels. His intended destination was probably the Château de Colombes, a few miles north-west of the centre of Paris. This neoclassical villa overlooking the Seine had been bought in 1657 by Anne of Austria, the widowed mother of King Louis XIV, as a home for Henrietta Maria, the widowed mother of King Charles II, and it was here that Henrietta spent much of her time with Henry Jermyn, whose constant service to the Queen Mother had earned him the title Earl of St Albans.

Davenant had been described as a ‘Servant of Her Majesty’ as far back as 1635. His widow would later recall that her royal namesake ‘did Graciously take him into her Family’, and he had remained the queen’s loyal servant. He had also dedicated his comedy, The Platonic Lovers, to Henrietta’s favourite in 1635. From that time on, the tiny, delicate Henrietta Maria and the broad-shouldered, overweight Henry Jermyn had effectively been Davenant’s joint patrons, and he had shared many of their misfortunes. Between them, in the years to come, Davenant and Jermyn would establish what we now think of as London’s West End.

The line between servant and spy was a fine one. Like his friend Abraham Cowley, Davenant was almost certainly part of Jermyn’s network of Royalist agents. If Sir William did cross the Channel in March 1660 it would have been to bring the latest news from London and to find out how he could best serve Henrietta Maria and her favourite at this propitious time.

Whether he travelled to Paris or not is unclear. What is known is that, towards the end of that month, Davenant took on the lease of a tennis court.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields is the largest public square in London. Sandwiched between High Holborn and the Strand, where the River Thames makes a sharp turn to the east, the fields adjoined the gardens belonging to Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court where gentlemen studied to practise law.

It was a fashionable part of town. By day, people walked in the fields; by night, illicit couples fornicated there. Linen was laid out on the grass to dry. Trained bands of militia were drilled in the open air.

Immediately to the south lay the ‘Lesser’ or Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields where, in the summer of 1656, Sir David Cunningham sold a parcel or two of land along the verge of the ‘causeway leading from the New Market place towards Lincoln’s Inn’ to a lawyer named Horatio Moore and a gentleman called James Hooker. Moore was acting for his mother-in-law, Anne Tyler, who lived in nearby Fetter Lane, and her new husband, Thomas Lisle, whose name was kept out of the transaction because, as a former servant to the king, he was ‘obnoxious to the powers’ of Cromwell’s government. Anne Tyler and James Hooker quickly set about building a tennis court which jutted out into the open fields to the east of Lord Brudenell’s coach-house and stables, on the north side of the causeway which would eventually become known as Portugal Street.

It was not a tennis court in the modern sense of the term. The racket sport played there was real or ‘royal’ tennis, requiring an enclosed space with high walls and a lofty ceiling. Though Thomas Lisle had kept himself in the background during the legal exchanges, the new tennis court took his name. It was featured in Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of 1657 as a rectangular construction with a row of windows set high up in the plain walls and two ‘houses’ attached to the north.

The exiled royals had seen tennis courts used for theatrical performances in continental Europe. Davenant’s confidence in the king’s imminent return, and a subsequent boom in public entertainment, is reflected in the fact that, just three years after it opened, and two months before Charles II triumphantly arrived in London, he entered into a contract to lease Lisle’s Tennis Court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields for the purpose of converting it into a playhouse.

Tom Killigrew had been made a Groom of the Bedchamber, giving him intimate access to King Charles. On 9 July 1660 Killigrew obtained permission to ‘Erect a Playhouse with Players for his Ma[jes]ty’. The Attorney General was required to prepare a bill, ready for the royal signature, which would allow ‘our Trusty and Wellbeloved Tho. Killegrew Esq … to erect one Company of players wch shall be our owne Company’:

And in regard of the Extraordinary Licence that hath bin lately used in things of this nature our pleasure is that there sall be noe more places of representacions or Companyes of actors or representacions of Scenes in the Citties of London or Westm[inste]r … then the 2 Companyes now to be erected … and Wee doe by these presents declare all other Company or Companyes to be sylenced and surprest during our pleasure.

The ‘2 Companyes now to be erected’ were to be managed by Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant.

Davenant already had permission to build a playhouse and form a company. The patent had been granted to him by King Charles I in 1639, but events had conspired to prevent him from using it. Now it struck him as insufficient. The order for a royal warrant that Tom Killigrew had acquired established that Killigrew’s would be the senior company: the King’s Company, direct descendants – as it were – of Shakespeare’s troupe, the King’s Men. Sir William had ventured too much time, energy and money to risk being outdone by a crude jester who was six years his junior.

Within days of Killigrew receiving his order for a royal warrant, Davenant wrote up an order of his own. It was dated 19 July 1660 and addressed to the Attorney General, Sir Geoffrey Palmer:

Our will and pleasure is that you prepare a Bill for our [the king’s] signature to passe our Great Seale of England, containing a Grant unto our trusty and well beloved Thomas Killegrew Esquire, one of the Groomes of our Bed chamber and Sir William Davenant Knight, to give them full power and authoritie to erect Two Companys of Players consisting respectively of such persons as they shall chuse and apoint, and to purchase or build and erect at their charge as they shall thinke fitt Two Houses or Theaters with all convenient Roomes and other necessaries therto appertaining for the representations of Tragedys, Comedys, Playes, Operas, and all other entertainments of that nature

The two companies were ‘to be under the jurisdiction, government and authoritie of them the sayed Thomas Killegrew and Sir William D’avenant’. All other ‘places of Representations or Companys of Actors or Representers of sceanes in the Cittys of London or Westminster’ were to be ‘absolutely suppressed’.

At first the Attorney General wavered, unable to see the need for a royal warrant to establish a joint monopoly of stage plays in London. Davenant and Killigrew complained to the king, and the Attorney General was forced to back down. The warrant, for which Davenant had drafted the order, passed the privy signet on 21 August 1660. But Sir William was still not satisfied. He drafted another order, dated 20 August, which sought to quash all competition.