The Seven Deadly Sins (play)
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The Seven Deadly Sins was a two-part play written ca. 1585, attributed to Richard Tarlton, and most likely premiered by his company, Queen Elizabeth's Men. The play drew upon the medieval tradition of the morality play; though it was very popular in its time, no copy of either part has survived.
The play is significant, however, because the "plot" of Part 2 still exists; it was discovered in the cover of a 17th-century manuscript play, The Tell Tale, in the collection of Edward Alleyn's papers at Dulwich College. As the term was used in English Renaissance theatre, the "plot" of a play was a chart or diagram of its action, which was posted in the "tiring house" or backstage area of a theatre; the plot of S.D.S. 2 has a square hole punched in its middle where it was hung on a board for all to read. The cast members of an Elizabethan dramatic production had their own parts written out for them, with relevant entrances and cues—but they did not have their own individual copies of the play text as a whole. So the posted plot was an important resource in keeping the production organized. Surviving Elizabethan plots are extremely rare—only half a dozen exist.[1]
The existing plot for S.D.S. 2 is not from the original production ca. 1585, but from a later production ca. 1590-1. It was acted by personnel from Lord Strange's Men and the Admiral's Men, and starred Edward Alleyn (which explains how it ended up in his papers), and took place at The Theatre, the first of the large public theatres of the Elizabethan era. The plot shows that Part 2 consisted of episodes concerning three of the seven deadly sins, Envy, Sloth, and Lechery; S.D.S. 1 must therefore have been concerned with Greed, Gluttony, Wrath, and Pride.
The plot refers to the production's personnel sometimes under the names of the play's characters, and sometimes under the actors' names—and so gives us information about the members of the cast. That cast included many of the men who would form the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594: Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, George Bryan, Thomas Pope, Richard Cowley, and John Sincler.[2] It is also possible that other future members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men were in the production, but are named in the plot as the characters they played. When the same amalgamation of actors from two companies toured with Alleyn in 1593, Burbage was not present, but Phillips, Bryan, Cowley, and Pope were joined by William Kempe and John Heminges—a nexus of the team that would enact Shakespeare's plays later in the decade.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Chambers lists plots for George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar, and the anonymous and lost plays Dead Man's Fortune, Frederick and Basilea, Fortune's Tennis Part 2, and Troilus and Cressida Part 1 (not Shakespeare's play but another work, perhaps written by Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker in 1599). A plot for the anonymous and lost Tamar Cham Part 1 once existed and is known from descriptions, but is now itself lost.
- ^ Unlike the others named, John Sinkler, or Sinclo, was never a "sharer" in the Lord Chamberlain's Men; he was a hired man who played thin-man roles, like Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Shadow in Henry IV, Part 2. Sinkler played five minor roles in S.D.S. 2, but his colleague Cowley outdid him with seven (Gurr, p. 105).
[edit] References
- Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
- Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. Third edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
