Shakespeare's Men perform in Sudbury

Puritans, politics and a puzzle - Records of Early English Drama, Suffolk editor James Stokes weighs up the evidence that the bard's actors performed in Sudbury.

Sudbury still has a number of timber-fronted 15th and 16th century grand buildings. While there is a bit of a mystery as to where William Shakespeare’s own group of actors performed, the burden of proof suggests they did perform in Sudbury.

And it is possible that they did so having been despatched by the Crown - partly in response to the fact that this fourth largest Suffolk town was becoming increasingly puritanical in its religious views, and parliamentarian in its politics.

The town had a tradition of being popular with theatrical players. For between 1573 and 1623, the town received 25 troupes of professional players.

Among them was Shakespeare’s own company, the King’s Men, who staged a play in 1610, for which the mayor and burgesses paid them 5 shillings.

The entry listing the payment in the Sudbury civic accounts does not identify the play that they mounted before the mayor, burgesses, and other worthies of the town. Nor does it tell us the time of year when they visited. Likewise, it doesn’t mention Shakespeare or any other members of the troupe; whether or not he was there, the company certainly had access to his entire canon of plays, except, for the two romances and one history play that he had not yet written as of 1610.

More likely than not, the actors staged one of Shakespeare’s plays in Sudbury.

Records of Early English Drama’s Suffolk editor James Stokes writes:

James Stokes, REED

In 1607, things changed dramatically. The mayor, aldermen, and burgesses issued an order forbidding the further use of the Moot Hall for interludes or other plays that were ‘heretofore vsually suffered to be acted within the same Hall.’ Anyone permitting plays would be fined £5. In spite of the absolute nature of this prohibition, it seems most improbable that the town would have denied permission to the King’s own troupe of players to perform in the hall when they visited in 1610.

The order forbidding plays in the Moot Hall also signals another, much greater, moment of historical change concerning theatre in the town of Sudbury. Before 1607, some of the most important troupes of players in the realm had performed in the town—those of the earls of Sussex and Leicester, and the Lords Oxford, Sheffield, and Strange. (Scholars have long argued that Shakespeare may once have been a member of Strange’s Men).

But before 1607, according to the town records, not a single royal troupe had visited Sudbury. After that order in 1607, non-royal troupes disappear entirely from the Sudbury records forever, replaced by a veritable flood of royal troupes between 1607 and 1623.

It is difficult to know whether the prohibition concerning the Moot Hall had any local implications beyond the council’s stated purpose, which was to protect the building since it had ‘byn nowe latlie repaired & bewtified’, but the changes in Sudbury being so sudden and absolute, other motivations seem plausible.

Suffolk was strongly parliamentarian in its sympathies, and in many places strongly puritan in its religious views, especially among the merchant and yeoman populations. Several Suffolk scholars have shown that Sudbury was one of the four centres of puritan non-conformity in the county,

As the fourth most populous town in Suffolk in 1603, and as it was a substantial borough and market town situated on a strategic road from Sudbury through Bury and Thetford to Norwich, the Crown might well have thought it necessary to assert the royal presence through the substantial theatrical resources at its disposal.

One wonders if that is what might well have caught the attention of the Crown, and brought the world’s greatest playwright, his peerless troupe of actors, and the message of their plays, to those timber-clad buildings.

One of the most peppery of the Puritans in Elizabethan times is the pamphleteer Philip Stubbes.

Stubbes is perhaps best known for his popular book The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) in which he claims to expose some of the supposed ‘abuses’ in Elizabethan society and the theatre comes in for particular stick.

In Shakespeare and other dramas of the day it is the men who also play female parts. Stubbes and his supporters, known as anti-theatricalists, refer to men who dress up as women as “monsters of both kinds, half women, half men”. They consider such cross-dressing as a depravity.

Carrie Blais, commentating on the life of Philip Stubbes, writes: “Although stage cross-dressing was a necessity brought about by the all-male Elizabethan stage (women in England were barred from performing on the public stage until after 1660), critics have noted that Shakespeare’s use of cross-dressing is complex, and in fact may question the patriarchal structures of his time.

“Shakespeare attempts to undo the policing of gender boundaries and this attempt may perhaps be partly why the anti-theatricalists were so anxious about 'real' gender boundaries.”

Stubbes also argued that plays were magic. They had the power to turn men into aggressive beasts on stage – and that audiences might be drawn into the magic by imitating what they see.

Dismissing them as "filthy plays and bawdy interludes" Stubbes goes so far as to accuse them of being the work of the devil.

His work was a big success – it had four editions – clearly striking a chord with like-minded Puritans who also believed, like Stubbes, that "leisure leads to vice".