Note 311 — BOOK III THE COMPANIES (continued 3)

The illustration of Mr. Fleay’s methods of constructing stage history is delightful. In The True Tragedie of Richard the Third, a Queen’s play, the murderers of the princes in the Tower are Will Slawter or Sluter, ‘yet the most part calles him blacke Will’ (Hazlitt, Sh. L. v. 95), and Jack Denten or Douton. On this Mr. Fleay (ii. 316) comments, ‘One of the actors in it, Sc. 11, is called Will Slaughter, “yet the most part calls him Black Will”, i.e. the Black Will of Arden of Faversham, q.v., which had no doubt been acted by the same man. Another actor is called Jack Donton (Dutton) or Denten, an accommodation of the Dighton of history to the actor’s real name.’ Obviously there is no need to suppose that the characters in The True Tragedie bore the names of their actors. John Dutton is not very likely to have taken a part of four speeches, and Will Slawter is evidently added to the John Dighton of Holinshed, to give Edward V the ‘irony’ of a pun upon ‘slaughter’. As for Arden of Faversham, it is not known to have been a Queen’s play at all, and its ‘Black Will’ is taken from Holinshed. Having gone so far, I do not know why Mr. Fleay stopped short of identifying Black Will’s colleague ‘Shakebag’ with the name of an actor. Of course, Mr. Fleay’s blundering conjectures must be distinguished from the deliberate fabrications of Collier, who published in his New Facts, 11, from a forged document amongst the Bridgewater MSS., a certificate to the Privy Council under the date ‘Nov. 1589’, from ‘her Mats poore playeres James Burbidge Richard Burbidge John Laneham Thomas Greene Robert Wilson John Taylor Anth. Wadeson Thomas Pope George Peele Augustine Phillippes Nicholas Towley William Shakespeare William Kempe William Johnson Baptiste Goodale and Robert Armyn being all of them sharers in the blacke Fryers playehouse’. On this cf. ch. xvii, and Ingleby, 249.