“Very Well Liked”: Sir Henry Herbert and Professional Drama at the Courts of James I and Charles I
“Very Well Liked”: Sir Henry Herbert and Professional Drama at the Courts of James I and Charles I

Summary/Abstract: The office-book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–1642, is a key document for our understanding of early modern English theatre. It contains details of many of the plays which he commissioned from professional players for performance at the courts of James I and Charles I—details we often do not have from other sources, including titles, which members of the royal family were present, and which plays were liked or not liked by his royal masters. These have never been systematically examined to see, for example, how they related to the current repertoires of companies under his authority or whether he arranged them in what we would recognize as extended events, as in the staging of The Taming of the Shrew and its sequel, The Tamer Tamed, a day apart; Thomas Heywood’s two parts of Fair Maid of the West; and Herbert’s multiple showings of the now neglected two-part plays of Lodowick Carlell. We can also trace something of court taste correlating with the play-buying of the day, especially in the choice of works from the “Elizabethan revival” of the 1630s. Only parts of the office-book have survived, so there are large gaps in all of these narratives. But they do show us something of how the commercial side of 1620s and 1630s court theatre complemented the much more widely studied masques, ballets, etc. of the era which the court generated for itself.

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