The Bloody Banquet

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The Bloody Banquet is an early 17th-century play, a revenge tragedy generally comparable to The Revenger's Tragedy (a play variously ascribed to Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton). The Bloody Banquet has attracted a substantial body of critical and scholarly commentary, chiefly for the challenging authorship problem it presents.

The Bloody Banquet was never entered into the Register of the Stationers Company, but an order from the Lord Chamberlain (then Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke), dated Aug. 19, 1639, lists it among forty plays that are the property of William Beeston and can be performed only by his company, Beeston's Boys. The play draws its plot from Pan His Syrinx (1584, 1597) by William Weaver. The playwright draws elements from several stories in Weaver's volume, to create a revenge tale in which a Tyrant serves up a cannibal banquet, only to be assassinated at the dining table, yielding the "bloody banquet" of the title. The existing text is about 500 lines shorter than the average length for a play of its era; discontinuities in the text suggest that it was edited before publication.

The date of the play is deeply uncertain, though its general style and tone place it sometime after 1600. It was first published in 1639, with an attribution to "T. D." on its title page. Some early commentators on the play identified T. D. as Thomas Drue, simply on the strength on the common initials; but since virtually nothing is known about Drue (the author of only one acknowledged play, The Duchess of Suffolk), the attribution offered little enlightenment, and left a wide-open field for other candidates. Scholars have attempted to assign the play to Thomas Dekker, Robert Davenport, and Thomas Middleton; but the contradictory evidence has not led to a determination of a most-likely candidate. David Lake, in his analysis of attribution problems in the Middleton canon, suggests that "The play is a much-revised one, written originally by Middleton with some help from Dekker about 1600-02"^[1]—though he acknowledges this as only one possibility.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Lake, The Canon of Middleton's Plays, p. 241.

[edit] References

• Anonymous. The Bloody Banquet. Malone Society Reprints, Oxford University Press, 1961, 1962.
• Lake, David J. The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
• Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.