Interval show lands pair in jail

On a winter’s night in a remote area of outstanding natural beauty just north of Harrogate a relatively new Shakespeare play, Pericles, was being performed.

But what could have been an idyllic evening’s entertainment was to have disastrous consequences for the owners of an Elizabethan Hall.

What happened that night was to lead to the owners of Gowthwaite Hall – Sir John Yorke and his wife Lady Juliana – to be jailed for three years for allowing a seditious play to be performed.

We know Pericles was among the evening of drama because it was mentioned in an ensuing court case which resulted from the performance that night of February 2, 1610. King Lear was also mentioned – however it was the first recorded production of Pericles which had just been printed the year before; showing just how quickly and how far Shakespeare’s reputation had spread, even within his own lifetime.

Sir John was a conforming member of the Protestant church – though maybe not so enthusiastically – while his wife was a Catholic.

The evening performance by some travelling players was at a time when religious tensions were high, following the Gunpowder Plot on Parliament in 1606. King James I had introduced tough new measures to root out Catholicism, including forcing them to commit to an oath of allegiance to taking Communion, to the Protestant Church and its King. Those who refused became known as ‘recuscants’.

Away from London there were areas of staunch Catholicism. On this particular night in Yorkshire the travelling players were led by two Catholic shoemakers, Robert and Christopher Simpson.

Dr Siobhan Keenan, Reader in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, De Montfort University, Leicester, takes up the story:

Around Candlemas (2 February) 1610, a troupe of players led by Catholic shoemakers, Robert and Christopher Simpson is alleged to have performed Pericles and King Lear at Gowthwaite Hall in Nidderdale. The Elizabethan Hall does not survive to the present (standing on a site now beneath Gouthwaite reservoir) but in 1610 it was the home of Catholic-sympathiser and alleged Gunpowder Plot conspirator, Sir John Yorke. It is almost certain that Pericles was Shakespeare’s play of the same name and a good chance that Lear was his King Lear, plays printed in 1609 and 1608, respectively.

Dr Siobhan Keenan

We are not sure how the Yorkshire shoemakers gained copies of Shakespeare’s recently printed plays. They might have been given them by a local patron or bought them on a trip to London. But it’s perhaps more likely that they purchased them from one of the booksellers in nearby York, such as John Foster, who we know stocked contemporary literature, including plays.

The Simpson players appear to have been more renowned for performing ‘popish’ dramas. Why they should also have wanted to perform recently published plays is more intriguing. Such dramas were fashionable and performing them was perhaps a way of inviting comparison with the professional players. But the company’s reputation for performing such drama could conceal another reason for their acquisition of the plays in question. Both have a potential appeal for Catholic audiences. Pericles can be read as a kind of saint’s play in which loss and suffering gives way to miraculous redemption, while in King Lear all the good characters are suffering from exile, banishment, disinheritance and persecution of a kind that Jacobean Catholics might be expected to relate to, as literary scholar Peter Milward has pointed out. So the shoemakers could have been using Shakespeare’s plays to reflect on their position as Catholics in Protestant England, although their track record of performing in Protestant as well as Catholic households suggests that they may have been theatrical opportunists, as much as religious propagandists.

Whatever their motives, the fact that the Simpsons owned Shakespeare’s plays is a sign of how far his reputation and his works extended beyond the metropolis even in his own lifetime.

The Court Case was held by the so-called Star Chamber in London, with records of the hearing now held in the National Archives.

They reveal that the events that night had caused one or more members of the invited audience to alert the authorities for the alleged exhibition of Catholic sympathies.

The controversial play performed that evening which caused all the subsequent fuss was not Pericles, but a play about ‘St Christopher’ which was being staged around the same time. During the interval the players were alleged to have inserted an interlude in which a Protestant minister was out-performed by a Catholic priest, and then carried off to hell!

When the case came before the Star Chamber, Pericles and King Lear were mentioned – which neatly dates the fact they were being performed at this time…and it was the first mention of Pericles in performance.
The court fined the couple £1,000 each and sent them to debtors’ prison for three years.